TEITELBAUM v. UNITED STATES

June 12, 1969

Mendel TEITELBAUM, Petitioner,
v.
UNITED STATES of America, Respondent

The opinion of the court was delivered by: FRANKEL

FRANKEL, District Judge.

On June 2, 1967, Mendel Teitelbaum waived indictment and pleaded guilty to an information charging under 18 U.S.C. § 1542 that he had made a false statement on a passport application, this charge being the first of two counts in the information. Teitelbaum was represented by two lawyers at the time. On June 23, 1967, with the same two lawyers appearing on his behalf (at least one of these lawyers being familiar with the defendant for many prior years, and having assisted him in other criminal difficulties) he appeared for sentencing. He was sentenced to a term of three years, to run consecutively following a prior sentence imposed in the Eastern District of New York for other crimes having fraud as their essential quality.

Over a year ago, petitioner filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 claiming that his guilty plea of June 2, 1967, had not been entered with the requisite degree of understanding and voluntariness. The motion was submitted pro se. It made, upon oath, charges of the gravest kind. It was supported by seemingly pertinent learning. It was written intelligibly and in reasonably orderly, if somewhat rotund, style. It asserted that Teitelbaum's guilty plea was fatally defective because he had been incompetent at the time of its entry; because his own counsel and the United States Attorney had known of this condition of disability; and because he had lacked sufficient understanding of the English language to comprehend the proceedings at the time of his plea.

The charges on their face were such that they appeared to warrant the assistance of counsel and, possibly, an evidentiary hearing. Accordingly, with his consent, Professor Irving Younger (as Judge Younger then was) was assigned to represent Teitelbaum. He embarked upon the work with the kind of vigor the court had reason to anticipate. The course of his efforts was not smooth, and it was not simplified by the fact that Teitelbaum insisted throughout upon flooding the court and his counsel with direct communications of a lengthy and frequently lurid character. However, by mid-August of 1968, we had progressed to the point of a stipulated order defining the issues as follows:

(1) Whether or not the defendant was mentally incompetent at the time he entered his plea of guilty on June 2, 1967.

(2) Whether his plea was voluntary or was the product of a beating by agents of the Federal Government.

(3) Whether the defendant had sufficient knowledge of English at the time he entered his plea to understand the nature of the proceedings.

The order also reflected the recognition by all of us that Teitelbaum could not in any event be liberated immediately as a result of the present proceeding since substantial time remained on his prior sentence in the Eastern District of New York. Because that was so and because the case did not lend itself to speedy preparation by counsel, the matter was allowed to go over to the fall of last year.

In November of 1968, as a result of concurrent proceedings by Teitelbaum in the Eastern District of New York, it was made to appear that there were conflicting written reports as to Teitelbaum's current competence. Specifically, it was brought to this court's attention that the government was possessed of a psychiatric report rendered in April of 1967 suggesting that Teitelbaum might be "malingering," but affirming that there was no real doubt as to his competence. On the other hand, it was shown that by order of the District Court for the Eastern District, Dr. Matthew Brody had prepared a report in early October of 1968 reporting his diagnosis that Teitelbaum was, at least at that time, psychotic. In these circumstances, again upon stipulation of counsel, it was ordered by this court that Teitelbaum be committed for an examination under 18 U.S.C. § 4245 to determine his current competence and to indicate, as nearly as possible, the probable state of his competence at the time of his guilty pleas on March 6 and June 2, 1967, in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, respectively.

In accordance with that order, three staff psychiatrists of the Medical Center for Federal Prisons in Springfield, Missouri, made a "Report of Psychiatric Staff Examination" dated January 24, 1969. The unanimous conclusions of that report reflected the views of the three signatory staff psychiatrists and of Dr. David Hubbard, who, in his capacity as consultant psychiatrist to the Springfield Medical Center, participated in the examination and diagnosis. The concluding words of the report of January 24, 1969, are as follows:

"* * * [It] is [the] unanimous opinion [of the four psychiatrists] that [Teitelbaum] should be returned to court and adjudicated as competent to proceed in his appeal. The Board recommends that a certificate as prescribed under Title 18, Section 4245, not be issued, as there is no reason to believe that Mr. Teitelbaum was incompetent at any time prior to his sentencing."

At about the time of the receipt here of the foregoing report, since Judge Younger had gone onto the bench, the continued representation of Mr. Teitelbaum was undertaken by equally energetic and astute counsel. The court determined that there should be an evidentiary hearing, and such a hearing was conducted on March 10, 1969. Testimony was heard from Teitelbaum himself; from Dr. Matthew Brody, who had found Teitelbaum psychotic in early October of 1968; from Dr. Bernard Berkowitz, who had examined Teitelbaum in September of 1967 at Lewisburg Prison and found him "emphatically" free of mental disorder; and from Dr. Frederick M. Miller, one of the staff psychiatrists joining in the Springfield report of January 24, 1969.

At the outset of the hearing, following careful and deliberate consultation between Teitelbaum and his counsel, it was stipulated that all the issues raised by his motion except the question of his competence at the time of his guilty plea were being withdrawn. It was further stipulated that his competence on the date of our hearing, March 10, 1969, was not in question and the court's own observations tend strongly to confirm the soundness of that stipulation. Accordingly, our concern in the hearing centered only on the allegation that Teitelbaum had been incompetent on June 2, 1967, when he entered his plea of guilty.

The court's finding on this single issue may be stated with relative brevity: the evidence is convincing, by a substantial preponderance, that Teitelbaum understood exactly what he was doing on June 2, 1967, when he entered his plea of guilty. It also appears that he had a hope that he might be treated more leniently upon a guilty plea than upon a conviction after trial, but ...

Our website includes the first part of the main text of the court's opinion.
To read the entire case, you must purchase the decision for download. With purchase,
you also receive any available docket numbers, case citations or footnotes, dissents
and concurrences that accompany the decision.
Docket numbers and/or citations allow you to research a case further or to use a case in a
legal proceeding. Footnotes (if any) include details of the court's decision. If the document contains a simple affirmation or denial without discussion,
there may not be additional text.

Buy This Entire Record For
$7.95

Download the entire decision to receive the complete text, official citation,
docket number, dissents and concurrences, and footnotes for this case.